Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist who exerted a tremendous influence on early Twentieth Century art. He is best known for founding the cubist movement in painting with fellow painter Georges Braque.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He was the son of an academic painter, Jose Ruiz Blanco, who taught art in Malaga, and later in Barcelona. Picasso visited Paris several times as a young man, settling there in 1904. He was initially drawn to Paris because of his interest in the impressionist and postimpressionist artists at work there at the time. In Paris, he studied the paintings of Manet, Degas, Renoir, Vuillard, Toulouse-Latrec, Cezanne, Gauguin, and others.
Picasso's painting work is known by "periods," namely his "Blue Period" and his "Rose Period." His "Blue Period" is so named because of its symbolic exclusive use of the color blue to heighten the themes of poverty, hunger and mental suffering, an example being the painting "The Frugal Repast" (1904). His "Rose Period" paintings feature acrobats and other circus performers, an example is, "The Harlequin's Family," (1905). It was during this time, as he was living in Montmartre in Paris, that he became part of the artistic circle which included George Braque, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and art patron Gertrude Stein, as well as several other now famous artists and writers of the period.
Picasso's work "Les Demoiselles of Avignon" (1907) was his first "cubist" painting. "Cubism" is so called because it breaks up natural objects into geometric forms and reassembles them in aesthetic rather than naturalistic ways. A later example of this style was his "The Card Player" (1913-14).
In the 1920's Picasso experimented with surrealism.
Perhaps Picasso's most famous painting was "Guernica" (1937) which was named after the undefended Basque town destroyed in an air raid in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. This painting is an indictment of the bestiality of war and is often used to protest war and violence in general.
After World War II, Picasso lived in the South of France until his death on April 8, 1973. Picasso had two wives and four children, one of whom is Paloma Picasso, the jewelry designer.
Web Sites
Life and Works Images- Picasso Museum (Paris)
- Picasso Museum (Museo Picasso) (Malaga, Spain)
- Picasso Museum (Museu Picasso) (Barcelona, Spain)
- http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_126_0.html
- Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
- Pablo Picasso
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